Columns

Today I bring you some thoughts from Jon Butzon, who has spent years working to improve and reform education in South Carolina. He believes that not only should we have great schools but we can have great schools for every child in South Carolina. Here is what he thinks we should do.
There is no waltzing around it. K-12 public education in South Carolina is not working.

Two weeks ago, the S.C. Senate passed a bill that would lay the groundwork for the governor to appoint the state superintendent of education — making the Department of Education a cabinet agency and fully accountable to the governor. The bill has yet to pass the House, but a similar bill passed the House last session.

Last winter, the Committee to Incorporate Van Wyck, which I chaired, began advocating for the incorporation of Van Wyck as a defense against the involuntary annexation of Van Wyck by the proposed Town of Indian Land.

In 1929, Gaffney native W.J. Cash wrote his seminal book “The Mind of the South.”
Every subsequent attempt to understand the mind (and soul) of the South necessarily starts with this book. It has been so since it was written and will probably continue to be so for generations to come. It is that good.
The premise of Cash’s book is that there is a distinctive Southern mind, and I believe there is also a “sub-species” native to the Palmetto State that we could call the South Carolina mind.

The Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 Word of the Year is post-truth. It is an adjective “denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Emotion and feeling are the source of facts today. So now you can have your truths, and I can have mine.
The American bureaucracy is an example of post-truth because it has been poisoned with liberal false science, false news and personal beliefs. Universities are not teaching students to think, but what to think.

Since I was elected to the vacant House District 45 seat, the last few weeks have been busy ones, both for myself as well as the General Assembly and the state as a whole.
This is the first of many updates I will be providing about what’s going on at the State House, as well as what I’m doing to represent the people of this region.

Last month, a state House and Senate panel offered its solutions to fix South Carolina’s pension system, which is anywhere from $20 billion to $74 billion in debt, depending on whom you ask. What isn’t being discussed much now is how the pension system got this bad, likely because a lot of legislative leaders have overseen its decline.
There are a lot of reasons for this fiasco. Two of the biggest are poor investments and an unreasonably high assumed rate of return.

I have been accused of defending Donald Trump, and I suppose I do, because the president is trying to accomplish certain goals with which I agree.
The idea of making this country greater, safer and stronger does appeal to me. His methods of achieving that goal have been largely maligned and misrepresented in the press and by those who hate Trump on a personal level.
Trump has been called xenophobic for his so-called ban on Muslim immigrants. This is not a Muslim or a religious ban.

South Carolina, like most states, has a state flag, a state flower (Yellow Jessamine), a state bird (Carolina Wren) and not one but two state songs (“Carolina” and “South Carolina on My Mind”).
Dum Spiro Spero is one of our two state mottoes. Now, if House Bill 3078 should pass, that Latin phrase (“While I breathe, I hope”) would also become the official state anthem. An anthem is supposed to have a tune, right? The bill provides no music.